Evolution!

This is how the artwork evolved and developed.

So I knew I wanted to add unique designs onto vinyl records and I knew I wanted to base my designs around song lyrics from the actual vinyl record I would be working on, but the question was how to do this. I already knew how to work with different fonts and typographic designs, so that wasn’t a problem. However my first challenge was how to arrange the artwork on a circular piece of vinyl. I didn’t just want a “jumble” of words with no structure to the design and I knew that as I looked at the artwork, it had to accurately reflect the song and make sense to the reader/viewer. The lyrics had to follow their natural order but at the same time they needed to be visually engaging. I realised that the way to do this was to start to build the design clockwise around the vinyl itself. So that’s what I started to do. I started experimenting with different software packages that allowed me to layer and position words and fonts carefully onto a circular template. I selected different font styles which worked well together and started to use different effects, symbols and colour to bring the designs to life.

After a lot of experimenting and with various degrees of success, I had managed to create a couple of prototypes. I mentioned in an earlier blog that “Billie Jean” was my first Custom Vinyl Records design, however before I created “Billie Jean”, I had produced artwork for two other songs – Fleetwood Mac “The Chain” and The Police “Every little thing she does is Magic”. Although at the time I was reasonably pleased with these early designs, they were someway off what I wanted the final artwork to look like. However, these designs were structured well and allowed the lyrics to flow around the circular template. However this gave me a platform which would allow me to work on a more polished typographic design.

So from there I moved on to creating my “Billie Jean” artwork. I continued to further experiment and as I was creating the design I allowed the songs words and meaning to dictate how I should “animate” the artwork. By referencing certain parts of the song with imagery I was able achieve this, one example of this is the silhouette “face” feature at the start of the word “head” which you can see in the final artwork design here.

So now I had something close to a finished design. My next challenge would be around what songs to select for future designs and how I could apply these to vinyl and I’ll cover this in my next blog entry